Way 2 Freshers

How do I have a non-tiling (non-repeating) background image?

With CSS, you can use the background-repeat property. The background repeat can be included in the shorthand background property, as in this example:

body {
background: white url(example.gif) no-repeat ;
color: black ;
}

CSS

CSS is clearly very useful for separating style from content. But apparently people tend to have problems when using it for layouts. Would you say this is because people have not yet understood how to properly do layout in CSS, or is it CSS that is lacking in this area? What can be done to improve the situation? — Would the web benefit from HTML and CSS being complemented with some kind of “layout language”?

Layout and style should be tackled by the same language and the two are intertwined. Trying to split the two is like splitting the HTML specification in two, one specification describing inline elements and the other describing block elements. It’s not worth the effort. CSS is capable of describing beautiful and scalable layouts. The CSS Zen Garden has been a eye-opening showcase of what is possible today. If MS IE had supported CSS tables, another set of layouts would have been possible. So, there is still lots of potential in the existing CSS specifications which should be the next milestone.

Styles not showing?

There are different ways to apply CSS to a HTML document with a stylesheet, and these different ways can be combined:

* inline (internal) (Deprecated for XHTML)
* embedded (internal)
* linked (external) and
* @import (external)

Note: An external stylesheet is a text file that contains only CSS Styles. HTML comments are not supposed to be in there and can lead to misinterpretation (> is the CSS “Child” selector!).

How do I quote font names in quoted values of the style attribute?

The attribute values can contain both single quotes and double quotes as long as they come in matching pairs. If two pair of quotes are required include single quotes in double ones or vice versa:

<P STYLE="font-family: 'New Times Roman'; font-size: 90%">
<P STYLE='font-family: "New Times Roman"; font-size: 90%'>

It’s been reported the latter method doesn’t work very well in some browsers, therefore the first one should be used.

Why is my external stylesheet not working ?

There may be several different reasons behind that, but one very common mistake is to have an external stylesheet that contains HTML markup in some form.

An external stylesheet must contain only CSS rules, and if required, correctly formed CSS comments; never include any HTML syntax, such as

<style type="text/css">

CSS comments are defined as anything that is placed between
/* (the comment start mark) and
*/ (the comment end mark). I.e. as follows

/* This text right here is a correct CSS comment */

CSS comments may span multiple lines in the stylesheet. Nesting of CSS comments is not allowed.

Another reason for external stylesheets (and even embedded and inline stylerules) not to function as expected may be that you have tried to make use of some CSS-features that are not supported in the browser you are using.

External stylesheets shall also be served from the www-server with a MIME-type of ‘text/css’ in its ‘Content Type:’ HTTP header.
You may need to negotiate with your server admin to add this MIME type to your server if you are not able to configure the server yourself.

What can be done with style sheets that can not be accomplished with regular HTML?

Many of the recent extensions to HTML have been tentative and somewhat crude attempts to control document layout. Style sheets go several steps beyond, and introduces complex border, margin and spacing control to most HTML elements. It also extends the capabilities introduced by most of the existing HTML browser extensions. Background colors or images can now be assigned to ANY HTML element instead of just the BODY element and borders can now be applied to any element instead of just to tables. For more information on the possible properties in CSS, see the Index DOT Css Property Index.
How do I make my div 100% height?

You need to know what the 100% is of, so the parent div must have a height set. One problem that people often come up against is making the main page fill the screen if there’s little content. You can do that like this :

CSS
body, html {
height:100%;
}
body {
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
#wrap {
position:relative;
min-height:100%;
}
* html #wrap {
height:100%;
}

Here, the #wrap div goes around your whole page - it’s like a sub-body.

You need to use ‘min-height’ rather than ‘height’ for Firefox because otherwise it will set it to 100% of the viewport and no more. Internet Explorer, being well… crap, treats ‘height’ as it should be treating ‘min-height’ which it doesn’t recognise. (You can target IE by preceding your code with ‘ * html ‘).

To make floated divs within this #wrap div 100% of the #wrap div… well that’s more difficult. I think the best way is to use the ‘faux columns’ technique which basically means that you put the background in your body rather than your columns. If the body has columns and your floats don’t then it looks like your floated content is in a column that stretches to the bottom of the page. I’ve used this technique in my layout demos.

The problem is often not that the columns aren’t 100% height, but that they’re not equal lengths. Columns usually don’t start from the top of the page and end at the bottom - there’s often a header and a footer or sometimes, more interesting designs don’t have a recognisable columnar layout, but do require div boxes to be equal heights. This can be done with the aid of a couple of images and some css or with some javascript.

What is property?

Property is a stylistic parameter (attribute) that can be influenced through CSS, e.g. FONT or WIDTH. There must always be a corresponing value or values set to each property, e.g. font: bold or font: bold san-serif.

How do I write my style sheet so that it gracefully cascades with user’s personal sheet ?

You can help with this by setting properties in recommended places. Style rules that apply to the whole document should be set in the BODY element — and only there. In this way, the user can easily modify document-wide style settings.